Lisa Marie Presley’s just-released posthumous memoir is lifting the curtain on her life and tragedies. From Here To The Great Unknown, which was started by Lisa Marie and completed by her daughter Riley Keough after her death, was transcribed from tapes of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s only child frankly discussing her life. It is a compelling but relentlessly depressing read that touches on everything in Lisa Marie’s life from the death of her father to her high profile marriage to Michael Jackson.
Lisa Marie Presley died of a small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication from bariatric surgery she underwent several years ago, on January, 12 2023 at the age of 54 in Los Angeles, California. The autopsy stated that the opioids in her system did not contribute to her death.
To finish From Here to the Great Unknown, which she had promised Lisa Marie that she’d help write prior to her death, Riley listened to taped memories that her mother had recorded. Riley says her brother’s death [In July 2020, Riley’s brother Benjamin died by suicide] “was incredibly difficult to write about, as was my mom’s descent into addiction. And her own death, of course.”
The book is written in vignettes that alternate between mother and daughter’s voices. Roughly a third of the book focuses on Lisa Marie’s childhood years, both with and without her dad and detailing her fraught relationship with her mom, and a sizeable section is devoted to her relationship with Michael Jackson.
Here are five of the biggest revelations from Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here To The Great Unknown:
1. A grieving Lisa Marie kept her son Benjamin Keough’s dead body at home on dry ice for months
Lisa Marie welcomed daughter Riley and son Benjamin with her ex-husband Danny Keough, whom she was married to from 1988 to 1994.
On July 12, 2020, Benjamin died by suicide at the age of 27 and Lisa Marie was “beyond devastated” by the death of her son. Lisa Marie writes that after Benjamin, whom his family called Ben Ben, died she decided to keep his body on dry ice for two months, in a separate casitas bedroom in their home in Los Angeles.
“There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” Lisa Marie writes.
Riley writes that it was “really important” for her mother to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad” Elvis Presley, who died on August 16, 1977 when he was 42 years old, and Lisa Marie was just 9 years old.
2. Long before Elvis’ death, Lisa Marie worried that her father might die
“I wrote a poem with the line, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die,’ “ she remembers. Among many incidents, she describes finding him face down on the floor of his bathroom. He had tried to steady himself on a towel rack, which broke and he collapsed.
The last time that little Lisa Marie saw Elvis alive, she was coming in from playing racquetball. Her dad gave her a hug and a kiss, they exchanged I love yous, and he told her, “Go to bed.”
She woke to a commotion and Elvis was whisked away on a stretcher. Lisa Marie, who was 9 years old at the time, went to her bedroom, nervously smoked a cigarette and awaited word. An hour later, she heard her grandfather Vernon wailing, “He’s gone, he’s gone.”
“My life as I knew it was completely over,” she wrote, realizing later, “He’s dead and now I’m stuck with her,” meaning her mother Priscilla. [Elvis and Priscilla’s divorce was finalized on October 9, 1973, and before Elvis’ death they shared custody of Lisa Marie.]
3. Lisa Marie alleges that Priscilla Presley’s boyfriend sexually assaulted her for years
When she was 10 years old, Lisa Marie says that her mother’s boyfriend Michael Edwards, a model and actor, came into her room in the middle of the night. “He said he was going to teach me what was going to happen when I got older,” she writes. “He was putting his hand on my chest and saying a man’s going to touch here, then he put his hand between my legs and he said they’re going to touch you here.” She recalls him gently kissing her and leaving.
Priscilla was furious when Lisa Marie revealed the incident and called her daughter in so Edwards could apologize. “In Europe that’s how they teach the kids, so that’s what I was doing,” he told her.
But the abuse didn’t stop. “He would touch me and spank me, telling me not to look” and leaving her with a bruised bottom. “I assume he was jerking off,” Lisa Marie wrote. When Priscilla would confront him, “He’d say, ‘Oh, I was drunk’ or ‘She was actually flirting with me.’”
“I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,” Lisa Marie wrote.
Once, he complained about Lisa Marie leaving her underwear on the dryer and she shot back, “It’s not like you’re not enjoying that.” She says he responded by throwing a dining room chair at her, striking her in the back.
4. Michael Jackson told Lisa Marie Presley that he was a virgin
After first meeting when they were young, Lisa Marie and Michael Jackson got together in 1994. When they were romantically involved, “He told me he was still a virgin,” Lisa Marie writes in the book. “I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss. He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened. I was terrified because I didn’t want to make the wrong move. When he decided to first kiss me, he just did it. He was instigating everything. The physical stuff started happening, which I was shocked at. I had thought that maybe we wouldn’t do anything until we got married, but he said, ‘I’m not waiting!’”
The pair tied the knot in May 1994 when Lisa Marie was 25 and Michael was 35. The pair were married for more than two years before finalizing their divorce in August 1996.
Lisa Marie recalls their early time together as idyllic: honeymooning in Orlando and going to Disney World every other day. “I was actually so happy,” she writes. “I’ve never been that happy again.”
“There was an energy there, something about him that was truly remarkable, something that I’ve never ever seen or felt in my entire life, other than with my dad. … I fell in love with him because he was normal.”
As for the allegations of child molestation? “I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had.”
Jackson died of cardiac arrest on June 25, 2009; he was 50.
5. Benjamin Keough once drove Lisa Marie cross-country during a health crisis so she could do drugs along the way
At the worst of Lisa Marie’s drug addiction, which began after the birth of her twin girls in 2008, she was consuming 80 pills a day. [In 2008, Lisa Marie welcomed twin daughters Finley and Harper with then-husband Michael Lockwood, though the two divorced in 2016.]
“My whole life had blown up, it felt like one thing after another, and I could not take any more beatings,” she writes.
She would frequently travel to Graceland to sleep in Elvis’ bed, Riley writes. She was “desperate to feel protected, desperate to connect with her father. … It was the feeling of going to church when all is lost and saying, ‘Please, Jesus, help me.’”
With her health failing, Benjamin rented a tour bus in Nashville to drive Lisa Marie and the twins to LA, where her doctors were. “We drove because I wanted to do cocaine the whole time and couldn’t if I was on an airplane,” she wrote. “I didn’t think I could even get through airport security.”
While in rehab, Lisa Marie underwent the weight-loss bariatric surgery that eventually led to her death from a small bowel obstruction.
From Here to the Great Unknown is available in bookstores across the country now.
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